A garment is generally made by sewing together a number of pieces of clothes. A design of a garment, then, is largely determined by the shapes of these pieces. Traditionally, pieces of thick papers with exactly the same shape and size as the pieces of clothes are used to record the shapes that determine the design of a garment. These variously shaped thick papers are called “patterns” in the industry. A collection of patterns that comprise a whole garment is called a style. Given such a style, one can make the pieces of clothes by simply copying the shape of the patterns, and then produce a garment of desired design by sewing the clothes together.
In an industrial setting, where many different designs and sizes of garments are produced, it is a major effort to correctly inventory and manage hundreds or more of styles. Thus, a computerization of the process of recording and managing garment design was introduced to the industry. In a computerized design management system, the shape of each cloth is stored as a set of curves and lines, making a digital pattern. From such a digital pattern, it is easy to plot a life-sized shape on a piece of paper using a plotter, or even automatically cut such a shape out of paper or a cloth using a special plotter that has cutters instead of pens.
There are many benefits to such computerization of the design. When the shape and size of each piece of cloth are recorded in a digital form, it is much easier to record and manage a large set of such designs. Also, digitized design can be transmitted to far off location, where garments are manufactured. The biggest advantage, however, might be the ease of grading. Usually, in an industrial setting, garments of several different sizes of the same basic design have to be manufactured. Modification of styles to produce different sizes of garments is called grading. This process of grading is much easier and faster when done on a computer.
The input and output of the system is in a physical form. The output is, of course, the actual garment that is manufactured. In theory, it is conceivable to put the whole process on a computer except for manufacturing; fashion designers, or stylists, could design dresses and suits on a computer screen, and have the results sent out to the factory, where the design is put into a physical form for the first time. However, at least for most of the current generation of stylists, it is much more natural and easier to use a physical form, that is, the physical patterns made of thick papers. Thus, at the beginning of the process, a stylist produces a style, i.e., a collection of physical patterns, and then each pattern is digitized into a digital form by a “modeler,” who uses a “digitizer” to trace the contour of the pattern.
This process of digitizing the physical patterns has been slow and labor-intensive. Typically, the modeler fixes the pattern on a large digitizer board and the trace the contour of the pattern by pointing (with a special pointer) relevant points on the contour one by one and pushing a button that signals the digitizer board to locate and record the position of the pointer on the board.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,575,628 (1986) to Bankart, et al. teaches a pattern scanner. However, it has not been widely used partly because of its inability to automatically identify corners on the outline of patterns. The outline of the pattern is its single most important feature and the discrimination of the points on the outline into those that are corners and that are not is very important. To wit, corners are the most salient feature of the shape of the outline and also are often used as grade points. Almost all computerized design management system currently in use treat corner points differently from other points. Thus in the prior art the user have to either digitize manually with digitizer board or use an existing pattern scanner and then mark corners manually.
The present invention relates to this process of digitizing the physical patterns.